Jonathan’s agric plans

The current  Agricultural Transformation Agenda, as an offshoot of Mr President’s Transformation Programme, is, today, adjudged as the best working document better called ‘Action Plan’ to grow Nigeria’s agriculture. Given what the nation remarkably recorded across the 36 states and the FCT during the flag-off and roll out of the Growth Enhancement Support Scheme (GES) […]

The current  Agricultural Transformation Agenda, as an offshoot of Mr President’s Transformation Programme, is, today, adjudged as the best working document better called ‘Action Plan’ to grow Nigeria’s agriculture.

Given what the nation remarkably recorded across the 36 states and the FCT during the flag-off and roll out of the Growth Enhancement Support Scheme (GES) as a result of Federal Government disengagement on procurement and distribution of Fertilizer & Seedlings, also paves way for streamlining the e-wallet allocation of basic farm inputs to farmers via Mobile Phones.

The Action-Plan  encompasses an entire gamut of  diagnoses on what went wrong in the late 50s- early 70s judging from how Nigeria’s agriculture lead in the world in terms of cash and food crops export. Retrospectively, agricultural produce such as groundnuts pyramids, Hide & Skins, Cocoa, Palm oil, Rubber, Cotton, running into hundreds of millions of Naira which brought about the establishment of industries, basic infrastructures like schools, hospitals, clinics, boreholes, cement wells, courts, security formations, roads within all the 3 regions, were at one time or the other came to a halt. Due to what few termed as Oil exploration or discovery in commercial quantity?

So what? Our founding fathers maximally utilised agriculture and laid a formidable foundations to all that we have today and beneficially mingled with the colonial masters but never sold our treasures talk less of abandoning farming in any scale. A visit to the 3 regional defunct Headquarters of Ibadan, Enugu, Kaduna and cities where the Premiers served or visited during colonial and post colonial era, will suffice any one to see such initiatives.

Nigerians lets embrace our current Action-Plan as Nigerian dream to translate our vision from well crafted mission of treating agriculture as a business, using agriculture sector to aggressively create jobs.

Muhammad Alkali Adam, Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Abuja